As hard as it is to assess ANY job candidate’s knowledge, it’s even harder with SEO candidates because there’s so much gray area in the industry. This blog series presents questions you can pose to help you determine a candidate’s level of knowledge.
What do you do differently to optimize for search engines other than Google?
Have the candidate discuss how the various search engine algorithms differ. If relevant, address some of the needs of international optimization as well.
Here’s how I would answer:
Good SEO is good SEO. It doesn’t matter the engine, the same basic principles apply. Search engines just want to provide what their audience wants, which means they are trying to act more human. The more you make your site about your audience, the better your optimization will be for all engines.
Now that’s not to say they don’t each have their quirks. But rarely will the desires of one engine act in opposition to the desires of another. There are also some aspects of SEO that are only relevant for search engines and not users. Schema markup is one such example. You want to make sure to address all of these search engine specific issues, but for the most part keeping an eye on the audience is the best way to go.
Targeting multiple languages also has it’s own set of optimization needs. Aside from the content itself, most of these issues are addressed specifically in the code as well.